Contents

Bragg was born in 1957 in Barking, Essex,[4] one of the sons of Dennis Frederick Austin Bragg, an assistant sales manager to a Barking cap and hat maker, and his wife, Marie Victoria D'Urso, who was of Italian descent;[5] Bragg's father died of lung cancer in 1976,[6] his mother in 2011.[7] Bragg was educated at Northbury Junior School (now Northbury Primary), and Park Secondary Modern (now Barking Abbey Secondary School[8]) in Barking, where he failed his eleven-plus exam, effectively precluding him from going to university.[9] He put his energies into learning and practicing the guitar with his next door neighbour, Philip Wigg (Wiggy); some of their influences were The Faces, The Small Faces, and The Rolling Stones.[10] Bragg was particularly influenced by The Clash, whom he'd seen play live in London in May 1977 on their White Riot Tour, and again at a Rock Against Racism carnival in April 1978.[11] The experience of the gig and preceding march helped shape Bragg's left wing politics, having previously "turned a blind eye" to casual racism.[11]

Bragg peroxided his hair to mark a new phase in his life and began performing frequent concerts and busking around London, playing solo with an electric guitar under the name Spy Vs. Spy (after the strip in Mad magazine).[14]

His demo tape initially got no response from the record industry, but by pretending to be a television repair man, he got into the office of Charisma Records' A&R man Peter Jenner.[15] Jenner liked the tape, but the company was near bankruptcy and had no budget to sign new artists. Bragg got an offer to record more demos for music publisher Chappell & Co., so Jenner agreed to release them as a record. Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy (credited to Billy Bragg) was released in July 1983 by Charisma's new imprint, Utility. Hearing DJ John Peel mention on-air that he was hungry, Bragg rushed to the BBC with a mushroom biryani, so Peel played a song from Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy although at the wrong speed (since the 12" LP was, unconventionally, cut to play at 45rpm). Peel insisted he would have played the song even without the biryani and later played it at the correct speed.[15]

Within months Charisma had been taken over by Virgin Records and Jenner, who had been laid off, became Bragg's manager. Stiff Records' press officer Andy Macdonald – who was setting up his own record label, Go! Discs – received a copy of Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy. He made Virgin an offer and the album was re-released on Go! Discs in November 1983, at the fixed low price of £2.99.[16] Around this time, Andy Kershaw, an early supporter at Radio Aire in Leeds, was employed by Jenner as Bragg's tour manager. (He later became a BBC DJ and TV presenter, and he and Bragg appeared in an episode of the BBC TV programme, Great Journeys in 1989, in which they travelled the Silver Road from Potosí, Bolivia to the Pacific coast at Arica, Chile).[17]

Though never released as a Bragg single, album track and live favourite "A New England", with an additional verse, became a Top 10 hit in the UK for Kirsty MacColl in November 1983. After MacColl's early death, Bragg always sang the extra verse live in her honour.

In the same year, he embarked on his first tour of North America, with Wiggy as tour manager, supporting Echo & The Bunnymen.[18] The tour began in Washington D.C. and ended in Los Angeles. On the same trip, in New York, Bragg unveiled his "Portastack",[19] a self-contained, mobile PA system weighing 35 lbs (designed for £500 by engineer Kenny Jones), the wearing of which became an archetypal image of the singer at that time. With it, he was able to busk outside the New Music Seminar, a record industry conference.

Bragg released his fourth album, Workers Playtime, in September 1988. With this album, Bragg added a full backing band and accompaniment, including Tivey on piano, Danny Thompson on double bass and veteran Mickey Waller on drums. Wiggy earned a co-production credit with Joe Boyd.[21]

In May 1990 Bragg released the political mini-LP, The Internationale on his and Jenner's own short-lived label Utility, which operated independently of Go! Discs, to which Bragg was still contracted. The songs were, in part, a return to his solo guitar style, but some featured more complicated arrangements and included a brass band. The album paid tribute to one of Bragg's influences with the song, "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", which is an adapted version of Earl Robinson's song, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", itself an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Hayes.[22] Though the album only reached Number 34 in the UK Charts, Bragg described it as "a reassertion of my rights as an individual ... and a childish two fingers [to Go! Discs boss Andy Macdonald, who'd recently signed a distribution deal with entertainment industry giant PolyGram]."[23]

His sixth studio album Don't Try This at Home was recorded in the shadow of the build-up to the Gulf War and subsequent ground war, inspiring the track "Rumours Of War". Although there is social comment ("The Few", "North Sea Bubble"), it was intended as a more commercial pop album, released in September 1991. (Bragg called it "a very long-range attempt to convert the ball between the posts."[24]). The first single was the upbeat "Sexuality", which, despite an accessible video and a dance remix on the B-side, only reached Number 27 on the UK Singles Chart. Following overtures by rival label Chrysalis, Bragg and Jenner had been persuaded by Go! Discs' Andy and Juliet Macdonald to sign a four-album deal for a million pound advance; in return he would promote the album with singles and videos.[25] A more commercial sound and aggressive marketing had no appreciable effect on album sales, and after a grueling, 13-month world tour with a full band (the Red Stars, led by Wiggy), and a period of forced convalescence after an appendicitis, Bragg left Go! Discs in summer 1992, paying back the remainder of his advance in return for all rights to his back catalogue.[26]

Bragg released the album William Bloke in 1996 after taking time off to help new partner Juliet Wills raise their son Jack. (There is a reference to him in the track "Brickbat": "Now you'll find me with the baby, in the bathroom.") [27] After the ambitious instrumentation of Don't Try This At Home, it was a simpler record, musically, more personal and even spiritual, lyrically (its title a pun on the name of 18th-century English poet William Blake, who is referenced in the song "Upfield").[28]

Around that time, Nora Guthrie (daughter of American folk artist Woody Guthrie) asked Bragg to set some of her father's unrecorded lyrics to music. The result was a collaboration with the band Wilco and Natalie Merchant (with whom Bragg had worked previously). They released the album Mermaid Avenue in 1998,[29] and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000.[30] The first album was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category. A third batch, Mermaid Avenue Vol III, and The Complete Sessions followed in 2012 to mark Woody Guthrie's centennial.[31] A rift with Wilco over mixing and sequencing the first album led to Bragg recruiting his own band, The Blokes, to promote the album live. The Blokes included keyboardist Ian McLagan, who had been a member of Bragg's boyhood heroes The Faces. The documentary film Man in the Sand depicts the roles of Nora Guthrie, Bragg, and Wilco in the creation of the Mermaid Avenue albums.[32]

A developing interest in English national identity, driven by the rise of the BNP and his own move from London to rural Dorset in 1999, informed his 2002 album England, Half English (whose single, "Take Down The Union Jack" put him back on Top Of The Pops in the Queen's Golden Jubilee year[33]) and his 2006 book The Progressive Patriot. The book expressed his view that English socialists can reclaim patriotism from theright wing. He draws on Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.[34] In 2007 Bragg moved closer to his English folk music roots by joining the WOMAD-inspired collective The Imagined Village, who recorded an album of updated versions of traditional English songs and dances and toured through that autumn.

In December Bragg previewed tracks from his long-awaited forthcoming album Mr. Love & Justice at a one-off evening of music and conversation to mark his 50th birthday at London's South Bank.[35] The album was released in March 2008, the second Bragg album to be named after a book by Colin MacInnes after England, Half English.

The same year, during the NME Awards ceremony, Bragg sang a duet with British solo act Kate Nash. They mixed up their two greatest hits, Nash playing "Foundations", and Bragg redoing his "A New England".[36]Also in 2008, Bragg played a small role in Stuart Bamforth's film "A13: Road Movie".[37]

He was involved in the play Pressure Drop at the Wellcome Collection in London in April and May 2010. The production, written by Mick Gorden, and billed as "part play, part gig, part installation", featured new songs by Bragg. He performed during the play with his band, and acted as compere.[38]

On 18 March 2013, Bragg released his latest studio album, five years since Mr. Love & Justice, titled Tooth & Nail. Recorded in five days at the home studio of musician/producer Joe Henry in South Pasadena, it featured 11 original songs, including one written for the Bush Theatre, and a Woody Guthrie cover. Stylistically, it continued to explore genres of Americana and Alternative country, a natural progression sinceMermaid Avenue (1998).[41][42] The album was a commercial success, becoming his best charting record since 1991's Don't Try This at Home.

For the entirety of Bragg's 30-year-plus recording career, he has been involved with grassroots, broadly leftist, political movements,[3] and this is often reflected in his lyrics. Bragg has recorded and performed cover versions of famous socialist anthems The Internationale and The Red Flag. Bragg said in an interview: "I don't mind being labelled a political songwriter. The thing that troubles me is being dismissed as a political songwriter."[43] Bragg has cited The Clash as a strong influence on his politically-themed material:

It wasn't so much their lyrics as what they stood for and the actions they took. That became really important to me. Phil Collins might write a song about the homeless, but if he doesn't have the action to go with it he's just exploiting that for a subject. I got that from the Clash, and I try to remain true to that tradition as best I can.[44]

Bragg's politics were focused by the Conservative Party's 144-seat majority landslide at the 1983 general election. He told his biographer, "By 1983, the scales had fallen from my eyes."[45] His record label boss Andy Macdonald observed that "his presence onstage took on more of the avenging angel."[46] Bragg was exercised by the 1984 miners' strike, and played many benefit gigs in mining towns like Newport, Corby and Sunderland.[47] The following year, after playing a short Labour Party-sponsored Jobs For Youth tour, he joined other like-minded activists in the public eye to form the musicians' alliance Red Wedge, which promoted Labour's cause - and in turn lobbied the party on youth issues - in the run-up to the 1987 general election,[48] with a national tour in 1986 alongside The Style Council, Jerry Dammers and The Communards.

In 1999, he was invited to appear before a commission that debated possible reform of the House of Lords.,[49] at which he put forward what became known as "the Bragg Method": the arrange the Upper House to proportionally reflect the results of a general election. "Trying to make it sexy is impossible," he said.[50]

Bragg supports Scottish independence.[52] In 2014, he praised musician David Bowie for speaking out in favour of Scotland remaining part of the UK: "Bowie's intervention encourages people in England to discuss the issues of the independence referendum, and I think English people should be discussing it, so I welcome his intervention."[53]

The British National Party would probably make it into a parliament elected by proportional representation, too. It would shine a torch into the dirty little corner where the BNP defecate on our democracy, and that would be much more powerful than duffing them up in the street – which I'm also in favour of.[54]

During the 2005 general election campaign in the Bethnal Green and Bow constituency, Bragg supported Oona King, the Labour Party's pro-Iraq war candidate, over George Galloway, the anti-war Respect Party's candidate, due to a belief that splitting the left-wing vote would allow the Conservatives to win the seat.[55] Galloway overturned King's 10,000-strong majority to become his party's only MP.[56]

In January 2010, Bragg announced that he would withhold his income tax as a protest against the Royal Bank of Scotland's plan to pay bonuses of approximately of £1.5 billion to staff in its investment banking business. Bragg set up a Facebook group, made appearances on radio and television news programmes, and made a speech at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park saying, "Millions are already facing stark choices: are they willing to work longer hours for less money, or would they rather be unemployed? I don’t see why the bankers at RBS shouldn’t be asked the same."[57]

On the eve of the 2010 general election, Bragg announced that he would be voting for the Liberal Democrats because "they've got the best manifesto".[58]

Bragg is a board director and key spokesman for the Featured Artists Coalition, a body representing the rights of recording artists.

Bragg announced the foundation of the organisation Jail Guitar Doors (taking its name from the song by The Clash), on the fifth anniversary of Joe Strummer's death at the NME Awards in 2007. Its aim is to supply instruments to prison to encourage prisoners to address problems in a non-confrontational way.[60] An American chapter of the organisation was launched in 2009 by MC5's Wayne Kramer.

In January 2011, news sources reported that 20 to 30 residents of Bragg's Dorset hometown, Burton Bradstock, had received anonymous letters viciously attacking Bragg and his politics, and urging residents to oppose him in the village. Bragg claimed that a BNP supporter was behind the letters, which argued that Bragg is a hypocrite for advocating socialism while living a wealthy lifestyle, and referred to him as anti-British and pro-immigration.[62]

In July 2011 Bragg joined the growing protests over the News of the World phone hacking affair with the recording of "Never Buy the Sun" which references many of the scandals key points including the Milly Dowler case, police bribes and associated political fallout. It also draws on the 22 year Liverpool boycott of The Sun for their coverage of the Hillsborough Disaster.[63]

In 2013, Bragg urged people not to celebrate the death of former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, but was scathing of her legacy. Bragg was quoted:

The death of Margaret Thatcher is nothing more than a salient reminder of how Britain got into the mess that we are in today. Of why ordinary working people are no longer able to earn enough from one job to support a family; of why there is a shortage of decent affordable housing... of why cynicism and greed became the hallmarks of our society. Raising a glass to the death of an infirm old lady changes none of this. The only real antidote to cynicism is activism. Don't celebrate - organise![65]

In 2014 Bragg joined the March in March anti-government protests [66] in Sydney, Australia